I personally have not done this many commits to curl in a single month (August 2019) for over three years. This increased activity is of course primarily due to the merge of and work with the HTTP/3 code. And yet, that is still only in its infancy…

Google has rolled out Chrome 77 into their stable channel as the newest version of their lightning fast web browser for Linux.

Chrome 77 now supports any HTML element providing form data via the "formdata" event, various security improvements, a Serial API for interacting with devices connected to physical or virtual serial ports, WebVR 1.1 support, tab sharing between devices, and a variety of other improvements.

Google has promoted the Chrome 77 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including Linux, Android, Windows, and Mac.
Google Chrome 77 introduces several performance enhancements to speed up your browsing experience, including new performance metrics that helps web developers measure how fast the content of a web page loads so you can access it faster than ever, as well as new form capabilities to support custom form controls.

"It has not always been easy for developers to measure how quickly the main content of a web page loads and is visible to users. The usefulness of existing metrics varies. Some metrics are only measurable in a lab, while others tell nothing about content that users care about. Consider the example below, taken from a DevTools performance audit," said Google.

Additionally, Google Chrome 77 introduces new origin trials that lets you to try new Chrome features before they are released and give feedback to the web standards community on their usability, effectiveness, and practicality. Users will be able to register for the origin trials here.

Google has announced that they would soon be performing a trial of utilizing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in the Google Chrome browser. This experiment will be conducted in Chrome 78 and will attempt to upgrade a user's DNS server to a corresponding DoH server, and if available, use that for DNS resolution.

For those unfamiliar with DoH, it allows DNS resolution to be conducted over encrypted HTTPS connections rather than through the normal plain text DNS lookups.

You might already be familiar with Crostini if you aren’t new to the Chrome OS family but if you are, Crostini is Google’s initiative to expand the usability of Chromebooks.

The company wants to achieve this by creating an evenly balanced environment where Linux apps can easily co-exist side by side with their Chrome OS counterparts and in the process creating a remarkably intuitive yet resourceful working space where users won’t need to leave Chrome OS for the sole purpose of using their preferable Linux programs to accomplish tasks.

Google is betting big on Crostini and the company hopes its success could effectively turn Chromebooks into enticing products for the development community but according to a feature request, Linux Beta on Chromebooks could be a lot more welcoming if the Linux flavor being offered by default isn’t limit to only Debian.

If you use the current Linux for Chromebooks beta, also known as Project Crostini, you probably have the Debian distro installed. That’s the default flavor of Linux offered as of today. But a Crostini user recently submitted a feature request to provide more options, such as Ubuntu, Fedora or theoretically, any Linux distro that Google could possibly offer.

As of today, the request has been assigned to someone on the Chromium team and has a priority level of three; roughly meaning to me that“it’s not terribly important at the moment but we’ll look into it.”

I’ve previously mentioned that I use a Chromebook for CompSci classes at my local community college. Thanks to Project Crostini, which installs a full Debian Linux distro, I can use the Linux versions of various developer tools. They work great on my Pixel Slate, but I did recently purchase a higher-end Chromebook with 16 GB of RAM to speed up the coding process.

Unfortunately one of my two classes this semester requires that we use an Ardunio microcontroller. This small device connects to a computer over USB to send my apps to the device. At some point, this will work in Crostini, but as of today with the Stable Channel of Chrome OS 76, the only USB devices supported in Crostini are Android phones. Even using the flag to allow unsupported USB devices doesn’t work with my Arduino.

Google has rolled out its "first Chromebook Enterprise devices," these being a couple of Dell Latitude laptops launched at the VMWorld shindig currently under way in San Francisco.

The Dell Latitude 5400 and Latitude 5300 2-in-1 will now come loaded with an enterprise version of Chrome OS – though note that Chrome Enterprise is not new, and what Google is referring to is that Dell is packaging Chrome OS with the Enterprise Upgrade so it is available out of the box.

In the release Google also emphasised the ability to enable "managed Linux environments" on Chromebooks, primarily with development in mind. The latest Android Studio is supported on Chrome OS, via the ability to run Linux, even though Linux on Chrome OS is still in beta.

After the second coding period, I was in the begin of the backend development. I’ll list and explain what was made in this period. After GSoC, I’ll still work on Khipu to move it out from Beta soon, then, I’ll fix the bugs and try to implement the things that are missing and new features.

Google Summer of Code 2019 has come to an end. This post is part of my final submission. It summarizes my contribution to Pitivi, providing links to my work.

My proposal consisted on a interval time system with different applications for Pitivi video editor. Originally, one of the applications would be to be able to set up markers at selected positions in the timeline, to store user metada.

After the first discussions it was clear that the core of the whole problem would be to implement the markers abstraction in GES (GStreamer Editing Services). They could store the information about position and duration needed. This was the base of my work.

The ultimate goal of my project was to redesign and redevelop the GTK’s official website https://gtk.org by providing it a design that follows current trends and content updation that really matters to the users and developers by using modern static site generators. This website uses Gitlab CI for deployment purposes. The project is a major milestone belonging to the release of GTK 4.0.

Today, Windows users hold off for as long as possible before "updating" their PCs. Chrome OS users, on the other hand, have their systems updated every six weeks without a hitch. And, I might add, these updates take a minute or two instead of an hour or two.

Chrome OS is also more secure than Windows. WIndows security violations pop up every blessed month. Sure, Chrome OS has had security holes, but I can't think of one that's been significantly exploited.

Want a nightmare? Try migrating from an old Windows PC to a new one. Even if you're jumping from Windows 10 to Windows 10, there are no easy ways to do it. If you have a Microsoft account, rather than a local account, you must manually move your local files from third-party programs such as Photoshop

On Chrome OS, you log in to your new Chromebook and -- ta-da! -- you're back in business. No fuss, no muss.

On Chromebooks when moving to the latest Chrome OS that switches over to a Linux 4.19 based kernel, BFQ has become the default I/O scheduler.

BFQ has been maturing nicely and as of late there's been an uptick in interest around this I/O scheduler with some also calling for it to be used by default in distributions. Google has decided BFQ is attractive enough to enable by default for Chromebooks to provide better responsiveness.

Chrome OS started out as a browser-based operating system that could run web apps only. Eventually Google added support for Android apps, and then for Linux apps, making Chromebooks more useful as general-purpose laptops.

But while most new Chromebooks feature out-of-the-box support for Android and Linux apps, many older models do not… and it looked like they never would.

It turns out that may not be true after all: 9to5Google reports that Google seems to be testing an update that would bring Linux app support to the 2015 Chromebook Pixel, along with a number of other models released that year.

The Google I/O companion app for Android often takes advantage of the latest design stylings and OS features. It demoed Android Q’s gesture navigation and dark theme this year, with the company today releasing the I/O 2019 source code.

Google today open-sourced the speech engine that powers its Android speech recognition transcription tool Live Transcribe. The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub.

Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into real-time captions. Unlike Android’s upcoming Live Caption feature, Live Transcribe is a full-screen experience, uses your smartphone’s microphone (or an external microphone), and relies on the Google Cloud Speech API. Live Transcribe can caption real-time spoken words in over 70 languages and dialects. You can also type back into it — Live Transcribe is really a communication tool. The other main difference: Live Transcribe is available on 1.8 billion Android devices. (When Live Caption arrives later this year, it will only work on select Android Q devices.)

More in Tux Machines

An Easy Fix for a Stupid Mistake

I waited a long time for Mageia 7 and for OpenMandriva Lx 4. When both distros arrived, I was very happy.
But new distros bring changes, and sometimes it is not easy to adapt. Mageia 7 has been rock-solid: it is doing a great job in my laptop and both in my daughter's desktop and in mine. There is one thing, though. I have been avoiding a strange mesa update that wants to remove Steam.
OpenMandriva is also fantastic, but this new release provided options like rock, release, and rolling. When I first installed the distro, I chose rock because I was shying away from the rolling flavor. Eventually, I had to move to rolling because that was the only way in which I could manage to install Steam in both my laptop and desktop machines.

today's leftovers

Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car.
While we're fascinated by the performance of Intel's open-source Clear Linux distribution that it offers meaningful performance advantages over other distributions while still focused on security and offering a diverse package set, we often see it asked... who uses Clear Linux? Some argue that Clear Linux is just a toy or technology demo, but it's actually more.

Radeon ROCm 2.7.2 is now available as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems.
ROCm 2.7.2 is a small release that just fixes the upgrade path when moving from older ROCm releases, v2.7.2 should now be running correctly. This release comes after the recent ROCm 2.7.1 point release that had corrected some components from properly loading the ROC tracer library.

There's an exciting patch set to GNOME Shell and Mutter now pending for finally wiring up the full-screen unredirected display / full-screen bypass compositing for helping the performance of full-screen games in particular on Wayland.
GNOME on X11 has long supported the full-screen compositing bypass so the window manager / compositor gets out of the way when running full-screen games/applications. That support under Wayland hasn't been in place and thus there is a performance hit for full-screen Wayland-native software. But now thanks to Red Hat's Jonas Ådahl, that infrastructure now appears to be ready.

After almost three years of research, planning and development we're proud to present the first public version of Xabber Server. Server is licensed under GNU AGPL v3 license, source code is available on GitHub. It is a fork of superb open source source XMPP server ejabberd by ProcessOne, with many custom protocol improvements an an all-new management panel.

After a summer hiatus during which I only released new packages for KDE Frameworks because they addressed a serious security hole, I am now back in business and just released KDE-5_19.09 for Slackware-current.
The packages for KDE-5_19.09 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2. On my laptop with slackware64-current, this new release of Plasma5 runs smooth.

Later, the County official discovered that the two men were in fact, hired by the state court administration to try to "access" court records through "various means" to find out potential security vulnerabilities of the electronic court records.

The state court administration acknowledged that the two men had been hired, but said they were not supposed to physically break into the courthouse.

Mark M5BOP reports the complete set of amateur radio technical talks from this year's Martlesham Microwave Round Table is now available to watch on YouTube
Videos of these MMRT 2019 talks are available:
• Practical GNUradio - Heather Lomond M0HMO

On the road to change, you’ll encounter fear and loathing. People will undoubtedly cling to old ways of working. Successfully making it to the other side will require commitment, passionate change agents, and unwavering leadership. You might wonder – is it really worth it?
Leaders who have made the switch to agile project management say that it has delivered benefits both large and small to their organizations, from the rituals that bring their team together – like daily stand-ups – to the results that make their business stronger – like better end products and happier customers.

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers.
Petkov this week published his initial patch for better optimizing the memset function that is used for filling memory with a constant byte.

In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks.
Complementing the "Core Scheduling" work, Kernel Address Space Isolation was also talked about at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The address space isolation work for the kernel was RFC'ed a few months ago as a feature to prevent leaking sensitive data during attacks like L1 Terminal Fault and MDS. The focus on this Kernel ASI is for pairing with hypervisors like KVM as well as being a generic address space isolation framework.

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration.
Intel's Linux developers have been working for several years on the 5-level paging support for increasing the virtual/physical address space for supporting large servers with vast amounts of RAM. The 5-level paging increases the virtual address space from 256 TiB to 128 PiB and the physical address space from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. Intel's 5-level paging works by extending the size of virtual addresses to 57 bits from 48 bits.

Using open source software is commonplace, with only a minority of companies preferring a proprietary-first software policy. Proponents of free and open source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening FOSS usage within the enterprise as well as gaining the “digital transformation” benefits associated with open source and cloud native best practices.
Companies, as well as FOSS advocates, are determining the best ways to promote these business goals, while at the same time keeping alive the spirit and ethos of the non-commercial communities that have embodied the open source movement for years.

Releasing Slax 9.11.0

New school year has started again and next version of Slax is here too :) this time it is 9.11.0. This release includes all bug fixes and security updates from Debian 9.11 (code name Jessie), and adds a boot parameter to disable console blanking (console blanking is disabled by default).
You can get the newest version at the project's home page, there are options to purchase Slax on DVD or USB device, as well as links for free download.
Surprisingly for me we skipped 9.10, I am not sure why :)
I also experimented with the newly released series of Debian 10 (code name Buster) and noticed several differences which need addressing, so Slax based on Debian 10 is in progress, but not ready yet. Considering my current workload and other circumstances, it will take some more time to get it ready, few weeks at least.
Also: Slax 9.11 Released While Re-Base To Debian 10 Is In Development